How Your Business Can Massively Benefit from Local SEO

SEO has been on the rise lately. It wasn’t long ago when people, especially local business owners used to think that digital marketing is just a sham and that it will pass away. But now we are seeing that more and more businesses are dedicating huge budget toward digital marketing and specifically for SEO.

Because they have seen first hand how powerful SEO is. It can literally make or break a business.

Let’s say for example that you’re a dentist in San Diego. It is obvious that most of your customers will be visiting you from your city. And it is possible that majority of them would be from your neighborhood. Getting customers from the entire country is just not possible.

And Google has designed their algorithms that way. A couple years back they launched their local search engine algorithm in which all the local businesses had a special place in the search engine. But that also meant that they would have a very hard time competing for the international keywords.

If we are being realistic here, just focusing on local SEO would be more than enough for a dentist in San Diego. I have a dentist client in a different city in the US, and with just local SEO, he gets more than enough customers. Heck, one day he gave me a call just to say thank you for keeping him busy with all the appointments his secretary has been scheduling lately.

Here’s a hint, he hardly gets a full 30 minutes for lunch because customers want to visit him urgently.

That’s the power of SEO.

If you want local SEO to work as you expect it to, you absolutely must optimize your website in a particular way. This will help Google understand exactly what your website is about and then it will rank you for the keywords that you are targeting.

So what are things that you should be looking to optimize?

Well, for starters, you should make sure that the name of your city is in the title of your website. And not just that, you also need to make sure that your professional is also there in the title.

So if that dentist from San Diego wanted to optimize his website, here’s how his website title would look like: “Best Dentist in San Diego California.”

Notice how I’ve included the keyword “best” and “California.” That is because those are the keywords that his customers might also search for.

Remember, there are a ton of rich people in the city of San Diego and entire California. And they might want to know who is the best dentist in the entire state. So if we can rank for those keywords, we might be getting some tier 1 customers as well.

And thinking from the perspective of a customer, what would you search for in Google if you were looking for an amazing dentist to get your root canal done?

You would probably type something like, “best dentist for root canal in San Diego.”

You would be searching for something similar to that.

Here’s my question: Would you call the #1 website in the search results or would you call the 5th website?

My bet is that you would prefer calling the #1 website because it makes sense. If that website is ranking #1 for that search term, it is possible that they might actually be the best dentist for getting your root canal done.

And that is basically how local businesses benefit from local SEO. They build trust and authority among their community and they also rank #1 for their target keywords. This keeps their phones ringing and eventually they end up taking that vacation to Paris that they have been planning for a long time.

The great thing about doing the research for SEO is that there are literally so many resources available at the tip of your fingertips. All of that is possible thanks to amazing free website builders like WordPress. Now even a 15 year old kid can start a blog about SEO tips if he has something that adds value to the SEO industry. And you can just do a simple Google search and know all about what goes on in his mind.